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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Rainbows on rainbows

Did I ever show you photos after we repainted L's room for her birthday? No? She wanted a rainbow room. She's our rainbow girl.

(Her rainbow room with the northern exposure is ridiculously hard to photograph. Sorry.)

She's a collector, this rainbow girl. She's always arranging, curating, rearranging. Her room directly reflects her aesthetic. It's raucous chic. It's more is more. But it's not just anything. It's deliberate. She builds her sunglasses-at-night square with purpose, and a lot of rainbow.

We just added that rainbow painting in the red frame. It's the one I pulled down from the classroom wall on her last day of preschool. She walked out jubilant on Friday, but on Saturday she bawled. She wasn't afraid of beginning kindergarten but she was heartbroken for leaving her beloved preschool. Finality is an ugly truth and she had to close the door on known love. She just cried and cried. She had to cry through it to be receptive to her new beginning.

Walking in that preschool room now each morning is a strange experience. I press my fingerprint to the sign-in thingie and only one kid's face shows up on my screen. It looks strange, so much space for just one registration where I'm used to seeing two. The teachers completely rearranged the room's furniture, as they do every so often, and I'm grateful that their whim to do so coincided with my need for recognition of this great change in our family world order.

They haven't taken down the wall's decorations, though. They probably will soon, make seasonal changes and room for new projects, but I feel a great satisfaction in the mosaic of rainbow paintings missing one of its tiles. I took L's rainbow home for her and there's a gaping hole in the preschool room's heart.

There's a little piece of preschool forever enshrined in her sanctuary.

It's a lovely rainbow, isn't it? A lovely rainbow that was painted by a lovely kindergartner.